IT WAS THE LAST DAY of the exhibit, and the hall of the Shanghai Workers' Cultural Palace was crowded. Groups of women and an occasional
man hurried to view the pictures and captions depicting the "Achievements of Shanghai Women, 1976-1986," even as workmen moved in to
dismantle the display. The exhibit was an impressive testimony to the
dedication and competence of women in many fields: science, agriculture,
industry, education, athletics, and the arts.

Without ever making explicit comparisons to China's prerevolutionary
past, the display made it clear just how much women's lives had changed
in the twentieth century. No longer were women's roles limited, as they
had been during the period of imperial rule, to domestic work, childbearing, household handicrafts, or prostitution. The options had widened
considerably even since the Republican period ( 1911-49), when many
women moved out of the home into industrial production, professions
such as teaching, social work, and medicine, student activism, and politics. With the coming to power of the Communist Party in 1949, women
were brought into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. They were
also expected to participate fully in the political and social transformation of society. The results, we thought as we moved through the hall,
were all around us: in the women of achievement portrayed on the walls,
in the confident manner and lively conversations of the women spectators, and in the fact of the exhibit itself--a government-sponsored
effort to promote public awareness of how much women had contributed
to China's development.

Yet two aspects of the exhibit troubled us. First, an occasional display
of statistical information indicated that the status of women was far from
equal to that of men. Less than a quarter of the city's Communist Party
members were women, a significant handicap in a nation where the Party
makes policy and controls political life. Even more disturbing, in a society that has begun to emphasize education as the key to development,
women were barely represented in the ranks of those currently studying
for advanced degrees in Shanghai (50 of 410 Ph.D. students; 156 of 7,753
master's degree students).

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